Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Jericho Brown has served as poetry editor at Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. His poems have appeared in Callaloo, The Iowa Review, jubilat, New England Review, and Prairie Schooner. The recipient of a Cave Canem Fellowship, two scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry

Seminar in Poland, Brown is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego where he teaches creative writing. Western Michigan University's New Issues Poetry & Prose published his first book, Please.

Patty Seyburn has published two books of poems: Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State University Press, 2002) and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998) which won the 1997 Marianne Moore Poetry Prize and the American Library Association's Notable Book Award for 2000. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, New England Review, Field, Slate, Crazyhorse, Cutbank, Quarterly West, Bellingham Review, Connecticut Review, Cimarron Review, Third Coast, Gulf Coast, Poetry East, Passages North, Seneca Review, Mudfish, and Western Humanities Review. She is an assistant professor of English and CreativeWriting at California State University, Long Beach.

Two Friends: Two readings by Daneen Wardrop and Elizabeth Kerlikowske. Daneen is the author of The Odds of Being. a collection of poetry that captures the delight of a new daughter, foreign adoption and the coalescing of eastern and western cultures. Daneen is a professor of English at Western Michigan University. Elizabeth Kerlikowske is the award winning author of Dominant Hand and three other books of poetry. She is the past president of Friends of Poetry, Inc. and has also worked as a creative writer in the Schools. Currently, Kerlikowske is an English instructor at Kellogg Community College.

Friday, March 27, 2009

The staff at the Laureate would like to thank all English instructors for encouraging so many wonderful students to send submissions and for helping to promote the journal. We are all invited to the reading next Wednesday in the lounge of the Honors College, April 1st, from 7-9 p.m. Refreshments will be served and journals will be available.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Congrats to Patrick Love, the 2009 recipient of Sigma Tau Delta Award, and to Meghan Dykema and Crystal Kelley, the 2009 co-recipients of the Sigma Tau Delta Outstanding Service Award. These awards will be presented officially at the Department of English Awards Day, on Wednesday, April 15, 3-5 p.m., at the Lee Honors College.

Opening March 27thAt The New Vic Theatre134 E. Vine Street, Kalamazoo, MI, 49007In a season of memories, nostalgia, comedy and music....

WMU Professor and Chair Emeritus Arnold Johnston’s play had its world premiere at The New Vic in 1973 and returns, with Nate Melvin in the role of Robert Burns, not only to celebrate the publication of Johnston’s novel of the same title. but also in celebration of the 250th birthday of Scotland’s national poet.This biographical drama covers the life of Scottish poet Robert Burns from 1785 to 1788, when he rose from poverty and obscurity as an Ayrshire farmer to nationwide acclaim and lionization by the aristocracy of Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital and a bastion of the European Enlightenment. Using a lively array of historical characters, the action captures the flavor of Burns’ work, his rich social and romantic life, his struggles to escape poverty, his frustration with a class system that set more store by ancestry than ability, and his bitterly comic encounters with moral and religious hypocrisy. The play is further enhanced by a liberal selection of Burns’ finest songs and poems.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Philip Taylor, is the recipient of TWO Presidential Scholar Awards, from English and Gender and Women's Studies. Lisa Minnick (faculty guest), Richard Utz (Chair), and Philip's family were there to celebrate with him. Congratulations!

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Five students and faculty recently attended and participated in the Michigan Academy Conference at Wayne State University. Kris Peterson, Courtney Schoolmaster, and Joyce Walker made the trek to Detroit to present their paper entitled "Students' Consideration of Audience and Ownership of Texts in Freshman Composition" as part of the Rhetoric and Composition panel of presentations, while Ilse Schweitzer and Chris Triezenberg presented papers as part of the Language and Literature panels. The title of Ilse's paper was "Grettir's Last Stand and the Icelandic Frontier: Frank Norris's Retelling of the 14th-Century Grettis Saga," while Chris's was entitled "A Few Good Books: Exploring the American Experience Using Memoir, Movies, Poetry, and Prose in the Undergraduate Classroom."

You are invited to the 4th Annual Edible Book Festival which will be held during Art Hop on Friday, April 3 from 6 to 9 p.m. Bring books made of food to enter. Entries are due for display at 6:00 p.m. The best entry will receive a free KBAC workshop. The winning book will be announced at 7:30 and all the books will be eaten at 8 p.m.

Richard Utz has been elected to serve as Division representative in the MLA Delegate Assembly for a three year term. He represents the Division on Comparative Studies in Medieval Literature, in which he served for the past four years as a member, secretary, and chair.

The Writer's Conference will be held Friday, May 15, at a new venue, Palmer Commons on UM's Central Campus. Sessions include mystery writing, children's bookwriting and publishing, both fiction and nonfiction topics, and MUCH more. The presenters are primed and ready to go - we are delighted to have Colson Whitehead leading a session, as well. The Conference is expanding into Saturday this year and these details can be found on the link above.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Bill Olsen's new poems and essays will appear in Triquarterly, West Branch, Gettysburg Review, New Ohio Review, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to the Prose Poem and Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets (Southern Illinois Press). "The Changing Other," an extended essay on John Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, appears in Words Overflown By Stars, a collection of essays by writers (Writers' Digest Books). His poetry is discussed in the most recent issue of American Poetry Review, in "On Capaciousness," an essay by David Wojahn. He read his poetry for the inaugural Court Green Literary Magazine of the MFA Program in Columbia College in Chicago, and this spring he will read at Westminster College in Utah.

Cynthia Klekar is the recipient of the Paula Backscheider Archival Fellowship Travel Award. The award is one of five highly competitive travel fellowships awarded by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. It will support a stay in Chicago so that Cynthia may work with the Newberry Library’s rare documents collection, specifically with transcripts of East India Trading Company voyages to Canton China from 1660-1688.

Hassan Al-Momani, one of our PhD students from Tafila University, Jordan, recently published an article in the Western Herald regarding the possibility of a comparative literature center based on the expertise present in WMU's English department and other units. READ THE ARTICLE

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Greg Laing, one of our excellent PhD students, is the recipient of a highly competitive WMU Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Out of the seven students recognized, he is the only one to receive a full-year fellowship. Congratulations!

As part of Kalamazoo's 2009 Reading Together program, Nic Witschi will join Isaac Turner, an English Instructor at Kalamazoo Valley Community College, in a discussion of the literary qualities in Rick Bragg's critically-acclaimed and immensely popular Southern nonfiction: All Over but the Shoutin', Ava's Man, and The Prince of Frogtown. The discussion, which is free and open to the public, will take place on 25 March at 7pm in Room 128 of KVCC's Arcadia Commons campus, at 202 N. Rose Street in Kalamazoo.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Chris Nagle will be presenting a St. Patrick's Day talk to the Honors Students Association on "Irish Girls Gone Wild: Life, Literature, Revolution" at 6:00 pm in the Lee Honors College lounge. Some holiday refreshments (probably not green beer) and a limerick contest are to follow.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Arnie Johnston’s plays, and others written in collaboration with his wife, Deborah Ann Percy, have won awards, production, and publication across the country. His poetry, fiction, and non-fiction have appeared widely in literary journals. His books include a collection of poetry, What the Earth Taught Us, The Witching Voice: A Play About Robert Burns, and Of Earth and Darkness: The Novels of William Golding. Johnston’s The Witching Voice: A Novel About Robert Burns will be published in 2009—for the 250th anniversary of Burns’ birth—byWings Press (San Antonio). Johnston is also an experienced actor and singer, having performed over 100 roles on stage and radio, as well as many concerts.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Happy Small Press Month! Here at New Issues we're very proud of our poets. These are just a few examples of the awards and attention our writers have received recently :

Jennifer Perrine, author of The Body is No Machine (New Issues, 2007) won the 2008 Ledge Poetry Award for “A Transparent Man Is Hard to Find.” She received $1,000, and her poem will be published in the Ledge.

Marc Sheehan of Grand Haven, MI, author of Greatest Hits (New Issues, 1998) won the 2008 Richard Snyder Publication Prize for his poetry collection Field Guide to the Native Emotions of Michigan. He received $1,000 and publication of his book by Ashland Poetry Press. Elton Glaser judged.

Katie Peterson, author of This One Tree (New Issues, 2006), and Jericho Brown, author of Please (New Issues, 2008), have both received a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Sandra Beasley's memoir Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life was taken by Crown. Poet and American Scholar editor Beasley is the author of the poetry collection Theories of Falling (New Issues, 2008). Crown's pub date is late 2010.

Elaine Sexton's Causeway (New Issues, 2008) has been named a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Jericho Brown's Please has been named a finalist for the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. The Publishing Triangle hands out both awards.

Eve Salisbury presented a paper entitled “Re-Mediation of Marriage in Gower’s Confessio” at the Medieval Association of the Pacific Conference held at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, March 6-8. The session on “New Approaches to John Gower” was organized by Georgiana Donavin of Westminster College and included Martha Rust of New York University and Anita Obermeier of the University of New Mexico.

Monday, March 9, 2009

Cynthia Klekar's article "The Obligations of Form: Social Practice in Charlotte Smith's Emmeline" has been published in Philological Quarterly as part of a special issue entitled "Rethinking Formalism."

This in from Jenny Steiner, Public Relations chair for the Western Student Association. "I wanted to inform you of an exciting event this Wednesday, March 11th at 6pm in the President's Dining Room in the Bernhard Center. We will be hosting Pizza with the Provost, which is a free event open to students to ask Dr. Greene questions relating to Academic Affairs. This would be a great opportunity for students within your departments to have their voices heard. Please pass along the information if you can, and please feel free to stop by the event aswell. Thank you for your time, and have a great day."

Sunday, March 8, 2009

At the Society of Early Americanists binannual conference in Hamilton, Bermuda, amidst lively discussions of transatlanticism, Puritanism, and print culture, panelists on "Sally Wood and Early Republican Culture" delivered intellectually invigorating presentations on this little known but crucial novelist of the early republic. The panel's paper topics included: "Women Writers and Women’s Rights in the Correspondence of Judith Sargent Murray and Sally Wood" (by Karen A. Weyler, University of North Carolina at Greensboro), "The Speculation of Dorval" (by Scott Ellis, University of Southern Connecticut), "Gothic Anxiety and the Illuminati in Sally Wood's Julia and Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond " (by Michael Cody, East Tennessee State University), and "Sally Wood's Complex Portrait of Europe" (by Scott Slawinski, Western Michigan University). The panel was organized by Scott Slawinski as a method of raising Wood's profile in the field of Early American studies, introducing her to new audiences, and demonstrating the depth and richness of her work. In addition, Slawinski chaired a panel titled "Angry Americans: The Development of National Rhetorics of Violence." Consisting of three very fine up-and-coming scholars, Sara Crosby, Heidi Oberholtzer Lee, and Margaret Abruzzo, the panel's goal was to continue a conversation begun on the early American listserv about Susan Faludi's controversial article in the New York Times wherein she discussions King Philip's War and American mythologies concerning the wilderness and Indian warfare, drawing connections to American foreign policy and terrorism in the wake of the September 11th attacks. Engaging conversations ensued during the excellent Q and A sessions for both panels. This, the 6th biannual conference for the Society, was dedicated to the memory of J. A. Leo Lemay, early Americanist extraordinaire and expert on Benjamin Franklin. Slawinski returned safely to Kalamazoo without any interference from the Triangle.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Francine Prose is the author of numerous books of fiction, most recently Goldengrove: a Novel.Her novel, Blue Angel, was a finalist for the National Book Award.The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired, was a national bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book. A recipient of numerous grants and awards, including Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, she was a Director's Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Currently she is Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bard College.

Arnie Johnston, March 24, 8:00 PM, Little Theater

Arnie Johnston’s plays, and others written in collaboration with his wife, Deborah Ann Percy, have won awards, production, and publication across the country. His poetry, fiction, and non-

fiction have appeared widely in literary journals. His books include a collection of poetry, What the Earth Taught Us, The Witching Voice: A Play About Robert Burns, and Of Earth and Darkness: The Novels of William Golding. Johnston’s The Witching Voice: A Novel About Robert Burns will be published in 2009—for the 250th anniversary of Burns’ birth—by Wings Press (San Antonio). Johnston is also an experienced actor-singer, having performed over 100 roles on stage and radio, as well as many concerts.